Drought Poem by Mira Midha

Death of a farmer
Her eyes desolate,
Not unlike the barren land of her birth,
Where there is no dearth
Of soul wrenching cries
And a dying story of an injured earth.

Her hands, blistered bleed,
As she stokes a fire that does not heed,
For it knows a weathered pan
Has naught to feed.

Sleep is singed, skin in rust,
A child plays the dust
That blows in rasps of thorny gust,
She tongues the soil to fight a gnawing pain,
Chews on grit, it is not grain,
But a gentle mind does not cease to dream,
Of green fields and flowing streams.


Her sound of glee brings a tearless wail,
Lost in the breath of a wind like a sword that slays,
Deaf the sere sky, no clouds sail….
The well is dry,
And so her eye,
Wearily waiting, waiting……
Sickle in hand
He had gone to reap coffins of crops sowed
On stretches of this wretched dying land.

Afar, yet yonder she had spied for days,
A crusty withered tree marring her way
Of sight that stares without a blink,
And somewhere in the lost recess
Of her mind she thinks,
That a mirage her vision hath spied
On those ghostly branches, a rope tied,
And even though the sun in death
Blows a phantom wind,
The rope afar has an eerie swing,
Inertia of a mind in coma says…
‘It is not him, it is not him.'

An age now has gone by,
No one has asked why,
Why does a ruined home lie wasted
In the earth's womb,
A hut that is now naught but a tomb,
To a child whose gleeful laugh has no sound,
A figure, eyes lost within empty sockets
On the parched ground,
Not so far on a distant skeletal tree is a home
To a shredded hanging rope and yellowed bones.